Al Jaffee's Mad Life

by Mary-Lou Weisman

Al enjoyed living in largely Jewish South Fallsburg. “It was like being in a modern American shtetl—but with bathrooms. The town even had an Orthodox shul nearby, one little movie theater, and one little school. It was small town, USA. It was to my scale. I liked to go down to the old railroad station to watch the huge locomotives come in and the happy passengers get off. I loved it there.”

  It was his twelve-year-old cousin Seymour who smoothed Al’s transition to South Fallsburg, just as his Lithuanian cousin Danke had done during Al’s first stay in Zarasai. “Seymour was such a wise kid. Everyone looked up to him. He was my mentor. He convinced me that not wearing a hat on my head all the time was not a sin. He got me to read my first English book—Gulliver’s Travels. I labored over that. He introduced me to all his friends. He took me to the Neversink River to go fishing. We dived off the bridge, over the Old Falls, and plunged into the swimming hole. He took me to my first backyard baseball game at the Levines’ and bought me my first Tootsie Roll at Weinstein’s candy store. Seymour taught me how to be an American. I had it all—well, almost all. It wasn’t mine and it wouldn’t last. I would always be an intruder.”

  In return, Al introduced Seymour to his world of mad inventions. The town was treating itself to a big Fourth of July celebration. One of the events was a downhill wagon race through town. He immediately enlisted Seymour in his project to design a wagon that would knock the citizenry’s socks off. “Seymour and I found a rickety old wagon and fixed it up with an elaborate display. I put sparklers and firecrackers from Weinstein’s on the wheels. Come that evening, we hauled this crazy wagon to the top of a big hill, lit the explosives, got in it, pushed off, and began our triumphant descent. We drew quite a crowd as this flaming wagon was going downhill, shooting off sparklers and fireworks in all directions. We were the talk of the town. We could have burned ourselves alive.”

  It was in the candy store, which sold a great deal more than ice cream and firecrackers, that Al discovered the comic book. It was called Famous Funnies, and it is generally credited as the first comic book ever. Al swooned with delight. “Famous Funnies was like taking the love of my life—the comic strip—and multiplying it to thirty-six pages. For ten cents you could buy an anthology of the most popular comics from the best syndicates. It blew me away.” The next year Al thought he’d died and gone to comic heaven; Famous Funnies had almost doubled in size, to sixty-eight pages.

  The publisher of Famous Funnies was pioneering Max Gaines, a printing salesman, who would later go on to publish Educational Comics (EC). After his father’s death in a boating accident in 1947, William “Bill” Gaines, inherited EC and changed the editorial direction of the company toward horror, science fiction, and satire—and the name of the company to Entertaining Comics. His most successful satiric publication would be MAD magazine. (Not blessed with the gift of prophecy, young Al could not appreciate the power of this moment at the time, although as an adult he enjoyed wondering about whether to credit coincidence or fate.)

  “The Depression was solid. Printing presses were idle. Max Gaines went to the syndicates that were publishing newspaper comic strips like Hairbreadth Harry and Boob McNutt and asked them what they did with the plates after the comic strips appeared in the funnies. “Nothing,” was the answer. “Go ahead, take whatever you want.” Max put his presses back to work and hit the road, stopping at every candy store along the way. The deal was, “If you sell some, fine; if not, I’ll pick them up later.”

  “In a few days, when Max came back, they were all gone. An industry was born. Originally, he had planned only one edition, but Max rushed to do a second ‘collected works.’ At some point the syndicates realized that they were giving away gold. They could do the same thing, after all.”

  Al spent a happy summer with the Cohens, and Seymour in particular, in South Fallsburg. He had everything a kid could want, including the strategic advantage of living over a candy store. But he didn’t have the company of his own family, about which he could do nothing. Nor did he have the comfort of his own home. It didn’t matter that the Cohens were nice to him. No matter where he would live in the next few years, no matter how well he was treated, the feeling that he was “a homeless, unwanted intruder” never left him, which is one reason why he built a clubhouse in South Fallsburg.

  Seymour and Al had all the kids in the neighborhood rounding up pieces of wood. Al designed the clubhouse so that it had a gabled roof, like the houses in Zarasai. “It was a great feeling when there were six or seven kids keeping nice and warm and dry in something I’d built. Never mind that it was a ramshackle little clubhouse hammered together by twelve-year-olds. The thing is that it kept out the rain. The house gave me a feeling of safety and protection. Every other place I lived in belonged to someone else. Nobody could march in and say, ‘What are you doing here?’ Nobody could push me around. This was my home, at last, a place I couldn’t get kicked out of.”

  As the summer was coming to an end, Al began to receive letters from his father, reminding him that it would soon be time to return to New York and start school. He recalled the words spoken on his arrival in South Fallsburg. “Oh, I remember being so depressed by those letters.” Al responded by writing an impassioned letter of his own, begging his father to allow him to stay in South Fallsburg. “If you need me to come to New York and go to work and bring money into the family, maybe I can do that here. I’ll send you the money, but leave me here,” he wrote. Al never mailed the letter. “I reread it. It sounded like such a sob-sister letter, or worse—like the way the beggars in Zarasai tried to crawl into your sympathy. I faced the music. I knew what my fate was. It’s like accepting the diagnosis of a terminal illness. First you rage, then you accept. I’m going to have to go back to this filthy city to a school I don’t know, with kids I don’t know, and it scares me to death.”

  This time Al’s worst fears were realized. In September 1933 Al and his father boarded with Aunt Frieda’s relatives. He thinks he was placed in the fourth grade at a school in the East Bronx near Saint Paul’s Place and Crotona Park. From now on father and son would share single rooms and sleep together in a single bed. Their room was not much larger than a closet. In subsequent rentals there might be room enough for a little bureau or sometimes a chair.

  The fact that Al was reunited with his father did not add to his sense of well-being. His once attentive, indulgent father, who had worked so hard for so many years to bring his boys home, was, for the one or two hours that he wasn’t at work or asleep, angry, critical, and remote. “By this time I distrusted both my parents.”

  In the summer of 1934, after a dismal school year, Al once again found himself boarding in the Borscht Belt, just a few miles north of South Fallsburg on Route 42 near the town of Wood-bourne. Perhaps the Cohen brothers would have taken him again for the summer, but this time Harry and Bernard needed summer lodgings as well, and the Cohens didn’t have room for three boarders. Instead, there being no shortage of unrelated people named Cohen in the Catskills, the boys lived in the servants’ quarters at Cohen’s Villa, a hotel that had thrived before the Depression but was now carrying on with a reduced clientele and fewer servants. The boys took their meals in the servants’ quarters, in a separate building that, with its generous rooms, may at one time have been the owner’s home. “We shared one large room and one big bed and played hide-and-seek in the living room. We didn’t get to participate in any of the shows, dances, or parties that were going on in the hotel, but we didn’t mind. We were happy just to get into a bed that was big enough for all three of us and play gin rummy.” It was while living in the servants’ quarters that Harry once again displayed the hostile behavior that had begun when he was living with his uncle. He persistently tormented one of the servants’ little girls, reducing her to tears. He didn’t stop until the child’s father threatened to “knock his head off.”

  “Basically, we were contented because the place was bucolic, peaceful, and quiet like Lithuania and the grounds were simple and pr
etty.” The hotel was large. A staircase led to a wide veranda that ran the length of the hotel where the guests would gather on rocking chairs to read their newspapers and chat. Al and his brothers weren’t allowed in the hotel. Neither was the black troubadour who showed up one afternoon in his tin lizzie and sat on the porch entertaining the guests. “His shtick was singing Yiddish songs about Mameleh* and songs I remembered from Lithuania like ‘Vein Mein Shtetele Vein.’† I was absolutely flabbergasted. He had a good accent for a greenhorn. Or a blackhorn. He might have gotten dinner, but he would have had to eat it on the steps of the hotel. There was a strict racial code at the time. Jews might have been liberal, but they weren’t that liberal.”

  The summer before in South Fallsburg there had been a parade with a brass band featuring a monkey riding on a greyhound’s back while a man with a megaphone shouted, “Come to the dog track.” Al had never seen anything like that before; nor had he ever heard a black man singing in Yiddish. “There was very little that was surprising in Lithuania.” By contrast, America kept presenting Al with fascinating, peculiar events.

  The boys had little to do during the day. They weren’t allowed off the hotel grounds, so they couldn’t walk into town. This left them with the option of netting fish in a small pond on the property, until Mr. Cohen informed Al that they’d been fishing in a cesspool. “Thank God we didn’t have access to the cooking facilities.”

  The summer took on purpose and excitement when the boys discovered a cache of lumber, a pail of nails, and a hammer in the crawlspace under the hotel. Al immediately envisioned another clubhouse, another home away from home. “Harry and I were both natural builders, but Harry was better than I. He had much more patience for infinite planning.” They looked around the property for a place where no one would be likely to discover their construction site and decided to build behind the chicken coop. “We’d wait until no one was around, and we’d sneak over to the hotel, grab a board, and run like crazy behind the coop. We were always terrified that the Cohens would find out we’d been stealing and we’d be thrown out of the place, but they never did. Later, when Uncle Harry took us to visit Seymour and the Cohen brothers, Harry and I bragged to them about how we built an entire clubhouse on the hotel property and didn’t get caught. And one of my uncles said, ‘They knew about it while you were building it, but they were so pleased with the way it was turning out that they didn’t want to stop you. They loved it. They turned it into another chicken coop.’”

  In September of 1934, the Woodbourne summer idyll came to an end. Bernard returned to the New York School for the Deaf, Harry went back to live with Uncle Harry, and Al and his father moved to another rented furnished room in an apartment at 2117 Vyse Avenue in the East Bronx. Their new landlord was a man redundantly named Pinchas Pincus. “Mr. Pincus, who must have been around sixty, was a spunky, dandy man with snow-white hair and a perfectly groomed white handlebar mustache that extended beyond his face. Mrs. Pincus—I never knew her first name. Even Mr. Pincus seemed not to know her name. He’d say, ‘Mrs. Pincus, I think it’s time for lunch now.’ She was a squat, slow-moving, cheerful, voluble balabusta.* She had dark hair tied in a bun. She looked like a grandma.”

  Like many adults of the time, Mr. and Mrs. Pincus were crazy about the comics, so much so that they had named their dog Sandy after Little Orphan Annie’s. The whole country was fascinated by the Gumps, rich Uncle Bim and chinless Andy. Blondie, one of the hottest movies of the time, came out first as a comic strip in 1930 and then went on to inspire a movie series in 1938 and a radio show in 1939.

  At midnight on Saturdays, grown-ups lined up at the newsstands waiting for the Sunday paper to be delivered. They were more interested in getting a jump on the funnies than they were in reading the front page. Monday mornings Al would go down to the basement where the super piled up the Sunday newspapers and swipe the comics.

  The Pincuses weren’t even “sort of relatives,” but they eagerly welcomed Al and his father into their home, perhaps because they had lost a child in the influenza epidemic and saw in Al an opportunity to care for a motherless and nearly fatherless child. “Mrs. Pincus kept trying to feed me. Mr. Pincus wanted me to take walks with him and Sandy. They wanted to bring me into their bosom, they wanted to adopt me and turn me into an ideal American boy, and all I had to do was listen to them and be a nice, cooperative, docile kid. But I wasn’t that kid; it was too late for me. I was almost thirteen years old, mixed up and independent. The more they tried to be nice to me, the worse I was to them. They wanted me to go into the living room with them and listen to radio shows like Bobby Benson and The Lone Ranger. They were shocked that I didn’t love Little Orphan Annie. It disgusted me that Pincus treated his dog like it was a human being. Why are they slobbering over this dog? Why are they letting this dog lick their faces? It’s a dog—a fucking dog.

  “I don’t want people to turn me into something else, no matter how nice they are. The surest way to capture a slave is to offer him something. I’d gone through Europe with all kinds of religious people wanting to turn me into a yeshiva bucher.* I didn’t want to be somebody’s surrogate son. Perhaps I felt so strongly about that because deep down I resented my parents’ not being together, not being available, and not being my parents. If I can’t have what’s due me, I won’t have anything.”

  One spring day, as Al and his father were returning to the Pincuses’ from an outing at the Bronx Zoo, Morris collided with another man near Vyse Avenue. “My father, who had a very hot temper, said, ‘Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re going?’ and this giant turned around, grabbed my father, picked him up by his lapels, and said, ‘Ya wanna fight?’ My father kind of weaseled his way out of that predicament and walked away shaken. The guy called after him, ‘I’ll let you go this time, but next time I won’t let you off so easy.’ I felt a sickening mixture of fear and humiliation. The scales were falling from my eyes. I realized that my father was just a little, hardworking man. What I had been relying on was the protection of a big man, not a person who was shrinking before my eyes. What if I’m waiting someday and he never shows up? I couldn’t see that there was anywhere to go from there.”

  Whether he liked it or not, Al, recently separated from his mother and his brothers, was now completely dependent upon his father. “For a number of days after that incident, I would wait for him to return from work. I knew approximately what time he was going to get off the 180th Street subway, so I would go to the corner of Vyse Avenue and look downhill toward the subway exit until he appeared. I felt great relief whenever I saw his gray fedora in the distance. This went on for a while until I felt reassured. My father was a small man, but he was the only protection I had.”

  It was after Al and his father were settled at the Pincuses’ that Morris sent for his belongings, which had been stored at Aunt Anna’s apartment. Among them was a cheap, battered, cardboard valise, barely held together by its metal fittings. “I clearly remember my father saying to me, ‘You know the letters your mother had you send me, telling me you were starving?’” Morris put the bag on top of the bed and insisted that Al watch him open it. Inside, filling the trunk from top to bottom, was a sea of pink receipts—proof that Al’s father had been sending money to his wife for years. “I remember my mother receiving pieces of paper like that enclosed in letters from my father. We had been starving, and she was giving money to the rebbe and the poor. He needed to prove to me that he hadn’t abandoned us. Then he threw the trunk and its contents away; he no longer needed it. Finally he had a witness.”

  While Al lived with the Pincuses, he attended PS 6, where the art teachers took note of his prodigious talent. Given his immigrant background, he astounded his teachers and fellow students by winning most of the spelling bees. Because of his success in spelling and his dazzling artistic talents, his teachers advanced him rapidly—Al finished what should have been a two-year course in a year and a half and graduated in January 1935.

  Even though Al was by no
w allergic to the kindness of strangers, he sought friendship from kids and found a real pal in Hilton Spikony, a boy his age who lived in the same building. “He was a very American boy; he had roller skates and a hockey stick. I pestered my father, who was at that point the lowest of the low in the post office, and somehow I got him to buy me a pair of roller skates and a hockey stick. I knew they would make me feel more American. Hilton took me to the top of the hill at Bronx Park South. The street went downhill for several blocks and ended abruptly at a waterfall at the Bronx River. I hadn’t been on skates before, except for one time in Zarasai, with disastrous results.” Al had dared to skate on Zarasai’s only sidewalk, whose owner threatened to beat him if he ever showed up again. “I laboriously worked my way six blocks up to the top of the Bronx Park South. Hilton warned me that we were out of the Jewish neighborhood and that if we encountered roving gangs of Italian kids they might take away my roller skates and my hockey stick. I remember the fear of Zarasai coming back. This is America? This isn’t supposed to happen here.”

  As they flew down the hill, the boys ran into trouble. “Out of nowhere about twenty-five kids of all sizes came after us. Hilton, who was very good on skates, turned, jumped the curb, and found sanctuary by parking himself behind a pregnant woman with a baby carriage. Today, of course, these kids would simply knock over the baby carriage and punch the pregnant lady to get at Hilton. But that was then. So now all twenty-five of them are racing after me and I’m going down the hill out of control. I have no idea of how to stop on roller skates. I’m picking up speed, but they’re gaining on me. I hear the big boys egging on a little guy who was maybe nine or ten. ‘He’s yours, Rocco!’ they’re yelling. ‘Get him!’